


Trigger

by coaldustcanary



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gunplay, Mildly Dubious Consent, Sexual Content, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:02:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coaldustcanary/pseuds/coaldustcanary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So much has changed, but really, nothing has. When she calls, he'll come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trigger

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for cruelestwarfare @ got_exchange.

As she sipped her barely adequate, warming martini, Cersei determined never to listen to any of Taena’s suggestions for newly-fashionable lunching spots ever again. She should have thought the better of it when they turned off the high street to the unassuming door in the alley, but the lifespan of these blink-and-suddenly-it-has-a-new-theme eateries was cyclical, she reasoned, and perhaps she had missed the newest trend in understatement. But when they had entered the establishment and the headwaiter had barely glanced in their direction, his shallow deference tinged with boredom, Cersei knew they had made a mistake.

It was confirmed as a terrible mistake by the appearance of the melty martini and Taena’s fussy pink cocktail clouded with unstrained lime juice.

It was nailed shut dead in a coffin by the sudden squawking presence of a gaggle of footballers’ wives, bleached, bosomed and babbling, who were escorted to a prime table.

Cersei turned a withering look on her dining partner, who shrugged and took a sip of her ugly pink drink, a white and gold silk scarf rippling over her shoulders.

“I see that up-and-coming as a descriptor was far more generous than this upjumped pub deserves. You need better sources, my dear,” Cersei snapped before the other woman could offer an apology or excuse. Flicking condensation from her new manicure, she pushed the half-finished drink away from her with irritation. Taena usually had better sense than this, but even her eye for London’s trends and undiscovered jewels sometimes erred. As the wife of a diplomat and a foreigner, she was often underestimated as a brainless ornament, but the reality was that she was smarter than her doltish husband half a hundred times over, and that made her useful to the Lannisters and Cersei in particular. Taena had her delicate fingers in altogether too many pies, but she understood that Lannister patronage was her best shot at seeing her husband’s stock rise within the ranks of government, thanks to his tenuous connections to the peerage. The Lannisters rewarded loyalty.

“Then we shall make it the new fashion, won’t we?” Taena murmured conspiratorially, scooting closer in the booth to Cersei, and then laughing softly, tossing her long black hair back over her shoulder. The movement attracted some of the eyes of the other patrons, though none stared, not quite. “If Lannister fortune is spent here, then soon it will be all the rage.” Cersei sniffed at the base flattery, though the comment was at least somewhat mollifying. In any case, it did have the ring of truth. The tabloids would get wind of this luncheon – almost certainly there was one or more trailing the footballers’ women for a tawdry photo or two – and word would get around. With luck, word would make it into society circles before it was considered “slumming”, and they would have to elbow their way through neck-deep social climbers if they came back next week.

“Some good press would not be amiss. This whole mess with Joffrey’s engagement is not putting us in a good light. The vultures want to paint that little harlot Margaery as some kind of people’s princess-slash-Kate Middleton and my baby as a rakehell. It’s preposterous.” Taena made tut-tut noises and patted her hand in a show of commiseration. Cersei tolerated the contact, but only just. The press had not been uniformly negative, but the relentlessness of it was unsettling. Unspoken was the reality that the mess with the Stark girl might be sniffed out at any moment. Great pains had been taken to keep that covered up, but if word of it broke in the press, there would be hell to pay.

“I just don’t feel safe with these vultures everywhere. Even if they can be used to our advantage,” she said finally. Taena nodded and shuddered delicately – an affectation if ever there was one, but the crass pseudo-journalists and opportunist photographers who fed the tabloids were, in fact, just that disgusting.

“Perhaps you should consider employing a personal bodyguard. Certainly the security company your family uses could recommend someone, no? For when you go out in the evenings, or to high-profile events, some strapping fellow in a well-cut suit might discourage some of the more bold bottomfeeders from getting too close,” Taena suggested after a moment’s pause, arching an impeccably groomed eyebrow. The comment was met with only silence and stillness from Cersei for long moments, enough that the other woman began to shift uncomfortably in her seat.

_Yes. And no._

“That’s absurd,” Cersei retorted sharply, so much so that the other woman leaned away from her abruptly, pulling herself together to begin mouthing an apology, but Cersei snappishly spoke over her stammered words, while tossing down a generous banknote on the table as she rose to leave, unable to stand her surroundings, or company, any longer.

“Why would I need a bodyguard when I have Jaime?”

She ignored the anxious look on Taena’s face as she strode toward the door, the restaurant’s staff scattering in her wake.

*~*~*

As he poured out a generous measure of whisky in the second glass, Jaime tilted his head, waiting for Brienne’s objection to come too late, as usual. He’d finished pouring and set down the bottle on the bar before she began clearing her throat to speak, and he’d picked up the glass and offered it to her with a bow somewhere caught between mocking and earnestly respectful before she’d stammered three words together.

“Captain…Jaime…you know I don’t…I can’t…” she said, bright blue eyes wide and her expression one of embarrassment. He raised the glass and held it up, inches from her chin.

“I know, and you do, and you can, and you will, because I can’t drink now until you take it. Take. It.” He punctuated the last two words by rattling the ice in the tumbler pointedly, and perhaps despite herself, she fumbled the glass into her own two hands, cradling it awkwardly while he turned back and picked up his own glass. He didn’t reach for it with his stump, and mentally gave himself a point on his running daily tally of self-control. It was a good day, thus far. He was up two, when the goal was only to break even.

“Now drink,” he ordered, taking a generous, burning mouthful of his own. She sighed, and at least made a motion of bringing the glass to her lips, though he doubted more than that, as she didn’t cough or sputter, but only stared at him with her concerned cow’s eyes.

“And smile, wench, we are celebrating my triumphant return to honorable duty and your fabulous luck in having an opportunity to get out of London in one piece, out of the service with your honor safely intact despite all the rules you broke to save my sorry hide, and with all the money in the world – or at least all of mine - in your bank accounts to find Sansa Stark, runaway heiress and little lost girl. If you’ll not drink to our mutual happiness, drink and wish fervently that your luck holds until you find her,” he said. Her lips thinned into a line and she set down the glass on the bar hurriedly, but he forestalled her objection by holding up a finger over the edge of his own glass, even as he took another long drink. Jaime blew out a heavy breath, licked his lips as the booze settled into his chest comfortably, and stared down the stubborn woman across the bar.

“Drink, smile, and get out while you can. My sweet sister will be here in half a tic.” The words held a touch of mocking humor to needle Brienne, but something in his chest stung as pleasantly as the liquor’s burn as he thought of Cersei’s imminent visit. He had hardly seen her since coming back from Afghanistan, and never alone. Not as he needed to see her. Not as they needed each other.

“I’m sure you’ve missed your family,” she said finally. Diplomacy was definitely not her strong suit, no.

“Cersei apparently misses me, or at least my presence by her side at the society functions. She wants me back, or, failing that, she has some kind of hilarious notion of getting me to teach her self-defense. I’m to teach her to shoot her way out of a tight situation like one of Bond’s femme fatales, apparently. She seems to have forgotten a few things have changed,” he grated out with a toothy smile, waving his stump in the air. When she hesitated, he fixed her unsettling eyes with his own.

“Go.”

“I’m going,” Brienne said slowly, seeming to weigh each word before she let it loose into the world, her awkward stance betraying her discomfort with the situation. “But I don’t understand why you’re doing this.” For certain, she meant his patronage of her search for Sansa Stark. Likely, she also meant something about his sister’s approaching visit.

“I’m damned weary of what the service said was honor, or my family, or even you, wench. This is my way of finding my own.” He saluted her with his glass, and drained it. Brienne may have never properly learned that discretion was the better part of valor, but she knew a dismissal when she saw it. She nodded, curtly, and headed toward the door. In the fresh silence, Jaime slid the empty glass down the bar and picked up the one she had abandoned, draining it before the ice could melt and dilute the drink any further.

He chose to ignore the anxious look the daft woman turned in his direction before she disappeared out to the cab that awaited her, idling in the drive.

*~*~*

Lannisters, as a rule, lived everywhere but at home when fortune and favor tilted their way. Casterly Rock, stately manse that it was, could be an inconvenient commute, for all its perfectly-situated splendor. The drive passed slowly for Cersei. Once she had decided upon a plan of action, everything that slowed or stymied it ate away at her, and even the briefest of pauses by the hired car she rode in to allow a small cab to pull out of the private drive to the estate irritated her beyond measure. Tyrion usually had better sense than to call a common cab for his girls when he entertained them in his apartments created in the old carriage house, but apparently his habits were degenerating with Father staying in London more regularly.

Ostensibly Jaime was recuperating from his injury here, a brief period of post-hospital leave before he returned to the service in some kind of limited administrative capacity. Certain social circles still fair buzzed with speculation about how he had managed to stay in the service “after everything”. Cersei had resorted to icy retorts to the unsubtle questions that had been directed her way at the previous weekend’s social events. The sheer nerve of their nosiness had been a trial.

The house came into view, then, but Cersei did not relax. If anything, the sight of the silent stone monstrosity sent a frisson of anxiety along her nerves. That he had not come to her already was galling, even infuriating. Jaime had never had the head for the politics of their family’s position, only the brash certainty of a soldier. But even he surely must have known about the scandals that ate at them from every direction these days, how the press and the gossipers tore at her with their dagger teeth. Why had he not come? What could keep him from _her_?

The car stopped in front of the door, and with effort, Cersei kept herself motionless until the black-clad driver strode around the vehicle to open the door for her. She disdained the hand he offered to assist her out of the car; the day she couldn’t fearlessly navigate the pristine white pebble gravel in four-inch bronze heels and a deep green skirt that hugged her hips in a death grip was the day they put her out to pasture. The main door opened at her approach, and though she expected to brush past a dark-suited servant, it was Jaime who lounged in the doorway, the front of his shoulder settled against the doorframe as he stared at her across the narrow gap she suddenly found hard to close. His hair had grown in, a little, from the severe military cut he’d once sported, and he’d let his face go from rakish stubble to a rough beard. He leaned into the space between them, waving like a tree bending in the wind so as to inch closer, his face stretched into a wan smile.

“Cersei, you came. I am touched.” He raised a hand – his left, his only one – and clasped it gamely to his chest. She still did not move, standing tall just outside the doorway. The house was dim behind him, and she glimpsed a vaguely dusty cloth cover draping a piece of furniture, still, as if her brother had not been living in the family home, but haunting it. He was thin, having lost the taut, sculpted perfection of his body and more besides somewhere north of Kabul.

“In the head, maybe,” she said, stepping into the space between them and reaching out to lay her hand atop his on his chest. Firmly, sharply, she pushed him back inside the door. He let her, eyes glittering in the dim light as she turned for an instant and slammed closed the door behind them, shutting out the prying eyes of the hired driver.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, stranding yourself out here like some kind of hermit. We have need of you in London. The Tyrells think they have the running of society these days, and the very gall of them is enraging. That old crone Olenna thinks she’s the queen of gossip and indecent rumors and she wouldn’t say half the things she’s murmuring in ears and muttering under her breath at every event where she can be overheard if you were there. You’re a goddamned _war hero_ , why don’t you act like it and get us even a single scrap byline of good press?” she raged, her fingernails clawed in his thin shirt as she clutched as his chest.

He laughed at her, and she bared her teeth in response, growling. She pulled back her hand to slap him, but he finally was the one to close the gap between them. He hooked his arm around her waist, pulled her close and settled his mouth on hers possessively, silencing the imprecations that bubbled up in her throat, swallowing every objection. She brought her hand down on his shoulder, hard, the blow muffled, but her gold-painted nails digging in, catching on the protruding edge of his collarbone. He tugged at her lips with his teeth and she returned in kind for a long moment, the kiss fought to a stalemate, his arm tightening around her, and she thrilled at his strength, all hers once again. But this could not continue, not here. She dragged her mouth away from his reluctantly, gasping.

“Not here. Not here, Jaime,” she hissed, trying in vain to thread her fingers through his still-short hair, though it had been many years since his mane had been long enough for her to use as a leash to lever his head away. He bit at her exposed throat in reply.

“Why not? We’re alone. I’ve sent the staff away for a summer holiday they’ve not had in years. Tyrion is in the north at our father’s behest.” He pressed her into the wall beside the door, trapping her against him, his maimed hand above her head and the other caressing her neck almost idly, thumb passing gently over the hollow of her throat.

“I need you,” she whispered. When he dropped his hand to hook his fingers under her skirt and pull it up, she gripped it with her own, holding him still and meeting his gaze squarely. “In London, Jaime. The family needs you, Father needs you, Joff needs you, but _I_ need you most of all.”

His hand gripped her thigh so hard she thought it might bruise, and though she cried out wordlessly at the pressure, she found herself reaching to hold his face in her hands, as if by sheer force of will she could make him know what she knew with unquestioned certainty. His expression of naked want might be her reflection cast in unpolished glass, not the mirror image they once were, but he was still _hers_. She dragged her fingers through his beard, down to his throat, nails scratching on the rough hairs, fingers pressing around his neck as she entreated him.

“Please, Jaime.” She kept her thighs pressed together even as he worked the skirt up over her hips, though she was already more than ready for him.

“Tell me you’ll come back with me,” she whispered, pulling down sharply on the collar of his shirt, popping a button that rattled across the marble floor as he fumbled at her panties, even as she jerked her hips away from him. His mouth hung open, his lips red from the mark of her teeth. Cersei smiled, showing them in a gleaming line. It was the lioness who did the hunting among beasts. She had him.

“I’ll come,” he swore.

He took her there, against the wall, and promised her over and over that he would, as he did.

*~*~*

It was said that the Lannisters lived like opulent feudal kings, dining off of golden platters, sleeping on golden sheets - the usual sort of jealous trash of the greedy underclass. Some joked about the Lannisters having so much in the way of riches that they ate gold, while other wags claimed they must shit it out. The fools would hardly believe the state of the room where he laid now, Jaime mused. The furniture was covered in grubby drapes, with all of the drapes drawn, hanging limp and heavy. The faintest cracks of afternoon crept through, casting a glow shot through with dust motes on Cersei’s naked form as she slept the sleep of the sated, her limbs entwined with his.

His head lolled back over the arm of the couch as he tried to put himself back together after pouring himself into her. It had been so long, and it felt _right_ , finally, to be with her, but her presence was like an intoxicating drug. Even asleep, even wrung out, he needed her like he needed to breathe. Cersei had not changed; what was between them had not, either. His place, as ever, was by her side, and she had made him swear to retake it so many times that he had probably murmured it in his sleep when they had passed out hours before.

As if his thoughts were a summons, Cersei stirred against him, waking and abruptly sitting upright with a sharp indrawn breath. Jaime cursed and edged off the couch to avoid having her flailing hand connect solidly with his cock, standing up nearly as fast.

“Ever so eager, aren’t we?” Even smudged with dust, her hair disheveled and damp, she looked every inch the creamy golden goddess of his memory. The half-longing, half-loathing look she shot in his direction as she elegantly rose to her feet was strangely satisfying. 

“We have to get back.” Cersei was unamused. Even her victory over him wasn’t enough to make her truly happy, he realized.

“What’s the rush?” He came up behind her as she bent over to pick up her clothes and handbag hurriedly. She yelped in surprise as he grabbed her around the waist, pulling her against him, humming in satisfaction, his lips buzzing against her ear.

“Were you not _listening_ earlier?” she snapped, halfheartedly struggling against his arms, clutching her things to her chest.

“I was busy,” he laughed, licking the top of her shoulder. She made a disgusted noise, which turned into a soft gasp as he flicked her earlobe with his tongue.

“Besides,” he continued. “Didn’t you come here so I could teach you to protect yourself? Or was that only pretext?” He punctuated his words with bites and sucks along the back of her neck, raising faint marks. She shuddered in his arms, and he smirked against the nape of her neck, teasing and testing her.

When the unsubtle click of a cocked pistol broke the silence, he froze, breathing hot against her back while his blood ran momentarily cold. The cold grip of fear receded into giddiness. It had been too long since altogether too many things, and despite everything he had endured, a little fear was like a precious gift. He slid his left hand, gripping her waist, up along her arm, palm sliding against her sweat-damp skin until it arrived at her own hands, wrapped tightly around the gun’s grip.

“There’s my sweet sister being true to her word,” he breathed into her hair, tilting his head only then to one side to see the weapon their hands converged upon. “You don’t do anything by half measures, do you?” She didn’t dignify the question with an answer – they both knew it was true. The pistol dwarfed her small hands absurdly. Even he might look like he was overcompensating for something carrying a weapon like that. Absurdly, he wondered how it had ever fit in her stylish little bag to get here.

“Father said I wasn’t to learn to shoot when you did, nor to hunt, certainly not to kill. I want to be able to kill something, Jaime. I should have had what you did, I should be able to protect myself,” she insisted, her hands only tightening around the gun. The safety was off, he noted dispassionately.

“And for all the good it did me,” he said bitterly. “All the best of all the best, best sniper in the service bar none, and then it was taken by some fucking peasant terrorist suicide bomber. They can’t fob me off with a medal and a ceremony, and yet there’s shit-all for me to do now.”

“Besides come with me,” she said. With his hand tight on the gun, she was able to break free of his arm around her waist and spin, facing him again, the gun clutched between them, pointed at the ceiling. Slowly, deliberately, he let go of the gun, even as the muzzle wavered in his direction. Cersei did not seem to notice.

“I said I would. I am nothing if not yours, Cersei.” She smiled, then, still cradling the gun in her hands, and while the threat of imminent death hardly gave him pause, that smile still caused his heart to contract painfully.

“You won’t need it. Not when I’m with you,” he promised. “I’ll not be sent away again. Nothing, not anything, will part us.” _Now. Say it now. Nothing between us._ “We could leave. Together. You and I.” He licked his lips. “I have contacts. Friends. I know places we could go. Why should we stay, when we could leave this shit behind us and be together?” Her expression was dumbstruck, and her hands slowly lowered, bringing the gun down in a hesitant, shaky arc toward the floor.

“Have you lost your senses?” Cersei cried. “Why would we leave? We can’t just bloody disappear like criminals on the run.” He wanted to reach out and grab her, shake her, make her understand, but the gun…

“We can. Together,” he insisted, but she cut him off.

“And we would lose everything that I’ve built here. Everything that I have secured for us, for the family, for our _children_ , Jaime. We can have everything…”

“Except to live how we might want. We will always – always be under the cameras, Cersei. They never end. They never stop. One wrong move as we are, and the wrong person sees, or some dumbfuck flips on his cameraphone, and it all falls,” he warned her. She looked away.

“We have to be more careful. But I’m not giving up what we’ve got without a fight.” She lifted the gun, holding it high in one hand, her chin raised so that she could stare him down. “I want what I want. And that includes you, Jaime.”

“You’re all I want,” he said simply, stepping sharply into her personal space to prove it to her once again with all the persuasion that remained to him.

When the shot rang out, deafeningly loud in the cavernous room, he did not flinch.

Later, as he fucked her over the arm of the couch while she writhed and moaned beneath him, he finally spared enough attention to notice the finely-painted portrait of himself and Cersei as children swinging askew from the wall above the fireplace, its frame splintered by the force of the bullet.

*~*~*

When the car arrived the next morning, rolling up the drive amid mists from the sun-warmed ground, they stood to either side of the ornate red front door, framed by massive columns. Cersei clasped her handbag at her waist, sunglasses obscuring her eyes, impossible heels raising her to the same height as the man across the doorway, just beyond reach. Jaime had put on a suit – not the uniform he’d worn for so many years, nor the cheap shirts and jeans he’d spent the past weeks inhabiting while prowling a near-empty mansion. He’d trimmed his beard and hair. Unthinkingly, he raised his right hand to shade his eyes, and cursed softly as he once again found it missing. He pitched his voice just over the rough crackling of tires on gravel as the car came to a stop before them.

“We don’t have to do this.”

She only shook her head as the driver emerged and went to open the rear passenger door, awaiting her approach. Her smile was as sharp as a knife as she started down the steps. She did not look back to see him follow.


End file.
